Somehow, after a very brief and unsuccessful career as a driver, through a
sequence of stupefyingly complex deals, he came effectively to own Formula
1. Singlehandedly, he transformed a niche pursuit for enthusiasts into a
global licence to print money, until he was Britain’s fourth wealthiest
person.
A divorce settlement of £750 million to second wife Slavica did nothing to
prevent him lovingly guiding their two daughters into careers in property.
One, Petra, chose for her starter home an $85 million Beverly Hills house
formerly owned by Aaron Spelling. The other, Tamara, starred in the elegant
Channel 5 reality show Billion $$ Girl. At a time when so many parents fret
about how their children will ever place so much as a toe on the property
ladder, Little Bern shines forth as a beacon of hope. All you have to do is
snaffle a sport, and Bob’s your uncle.
As Grand Prix racing has become ever more ineffably tedious (recordings of
races are now routinely used to treat chronic insomnia by NHS sleep disorder
clinics), so its Great Dictator has increasingly come to transcend it by
providing almost all of the entertainment with the originality of his mind.
His championing of neo-feminism has impressed barely less than his analysis
of the Führer as an malleable dupe: “Women should be dressed in white,” he
once sagely observed, “like all the other domestic appliances.”
Meanwhile, his annual attempts to reignite interest in motor racing have been
a reliable delight. One year, he advocated sporadically drenching tracks
with water to ensure aquaplaning, and it is suspected that future
masterplans include deploying a Safety Caravan at random intervals to
guarantee diverting multi-car pile-ups.
Whether he will have the chance to effect that and other brainwaves is now in
peril. While one may assume that his nominal relief from day-to-day control
of F1 pending the trial is a cosmetic public relations device of his own
making, a stint of up to 10 years in jug might stretch even this
83-year-old’s capacity to pull the strings.
Then again, it might do no such thing. His template, should the worst happen,
would surely be Noel Coward’s Mr Bridger in The Italian Job, who oversees
the gold heist from his cell. That elongated car race through the streets of
Turin ends with the bounty teetering on the edge of an Alpine cliff, and the
fate of Bernie Ecclestone hangs no less precariously in the balance today.
If his perfectly extraordinary 40-year dominion over Grand Prix racing is to
be drowned in a vat of Bavarian porridge, all one could do (apart, of
course, from offering sympathies to any Herr Norman Stanley Fletcher to his
Genial Harry Grout) is mourn.
But it has never paid to write Little Bern off before, and the German justice
system, much like that Nevadan Alsatian, may yet discover that it has bitten
off more than it can safely chew.